October 17, 2006

Dear Capital One

Dear Capital One,

Thank you so much for continuing your correspondence, your persistence in this matter is to be commended. Most people would have given up on me by now, but not you. Your optimism that I may write or call you one day is astonishing... especially given the fact that I don't think I've given any indication that I will. I've been trying to figure out what I did or said that would cause you to have such expectations.

Oh, that's right. I didn't do anything.

Somehow you got my name... and you somehow feel that gives you permission to write me every week, sometimes twice a week. Somehow you feel that you have the right to waste my time. Somehow you feel you have the right waste all the electricity my paper shredder uses eating your junk. Somehow you feel that you have the right to waste the all that paper with your "generous" offers.

You don't.

If I wasn't interested in your service the first, second or 100th time you wrote me, what on earth gives you the hope that the 101st or more might interest me?

I do, however, have something (besides my wallet) that might interest you.. an idea: instead of spending all that money on mailing lists, paper, people stuffing envelopes, and postage, why not do something worth talking about instead? Why not randomly pay peoples bills for them (don't advertise it, just do it)? Why not commit all the cash you spend on marketing to prevent identity theft? Why not allow people to put a certain percentage of their "rewards" to some worthwhile charity and provide matching dollars? And finally, become the number one lobbyist for health care reform (the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country)?

Comments

What I find strange is that we call it junk mail, but the companies sending it out don't realise they're throwing money away...
Hey, if they just want to market, why not simply do it intelligently? I mean, I agree with your points, but any company sending out junk mail isn't marketing intelligently... The % of returns are small on this sort of marketing tactic, so why not take the time to think about a marketing campaign that will increase the ROI? We live in a world where marketers should increasingly target niches, this is mentioned time & time again, and yet...
I'd actually group junk mail in with most TV adverts. In France record companies will advertise albums saying things like "your favourite group". NO IT ISN'T. Sorry, you're wasting:
-Your time
-My time
-Your money.
Companies should think before they act.

Chris, yeah, the returns must be high enough that they continue to do it. I recall reading stuff about America Online, for years they sent out trial CDs and it turns out it was a good strategy, they ended up getting tons of subscribers that way. People must be replying to these offers or else they wouldn't keep doing them... at least you hope that they're measuring the effectiveness, right? ;-)

Jon,
yeah, but don't forget that for every AOL example you have loads that don't work out as well. As I recall from my lectures, in France companies consider that approx 1-2% returns for a mail shot is a good figure. Junk mail is nothing more than a less qualified mail shot.
So why did AOL work? We need to take into account the context (Internet was just traking off, AOL was one of the better known brands, etc...) plus the fact that they gave away a certain amount of time of free internet access with the CD. And once people were using an Internet Service Provider at that time, they often didn't change. Loads of people were willing to try something that was free, AOL was reputed to be one of the better ISPs at the time, so people stayed with it.

You've made a lot of good points! I think that this form of junk mail will continue so long as credit card companies are not forced to feel the pain of those whose identities have been stolen. When a company like Capital One is forced to absorb the cost of someone racking up charges on a stolen card, those costs are just passed along to the other card members whose identities have not been stolen. So, identity theft hurts everyone, not just those whose identities have been compromised.

All of this will continue until people take their business only to companies that practice good security. Unfortunately, most of these companies don't disclose information information about their internal operations.